natural products. The distinctive weapons of the bourgeois in this
fight were those which came into existence through the development of
increasing economic force by reason of the growth at first of hand
manufacture and afterwards machine-manufacture and through the
extension of trade. During the whole of this conflict the political
power was in the hands of the nobility, with the exception of a period
when the king employed the bourgeoisie against the nobility in order
to hold one in check by means of the other. From the very moment,
however, in which the bourgeoisie still deprived of political power
began to be dangerous because of the development of its economic power
the monarchy again turned to the nobility and thereby brought about
the revolution of the bourgeois first in England and then in France.
The political conditions in France remained unaltered until the
economic conditions outgrew them. In politics the noble was
everything, the bourgeois nothing. As a social factor the bourgeoisie
was of the highest importance while the nobility had abandoned all its
social functions and yet pocketed revenues, social services which it
did not any longer perform. Even this is not sufficient. Bourgeois
society was, as far as the whole matter of production is concerned,
tied and bound in the political feudal forms of the Middle Ages, which
this production, not only as regards manufacture but as regards
handwork also had long transcended amid all the thousandfold
gild-privileges and local and provincial tax impositions which had
become mere obstacles and fetters to production. The bourgeois
revolution put an end to them. But the economic condition did not, as
Herr Duehring would imply, forthwith adapt itself to the political
circumstances,--that the king and the nobility spent a long time in
trying to effect--but it threw all the mouldy old political rubbish
aside and shaped new political conditions in which the new economic
conditions might come into existence and develop. And it has developed
splendidly in this suitable political and legal atmosphere, so
splendidly that the bourgeoisie is now not very far from the position
which the nobility occupied in 1789. It is becoming more and more not
alone a social superfluity but a social impediment. It takes an ever
diminishing part in the work of production and becomes more and more,
as the noble did, a mere revenue consuming class. And this revolution
in its position and the cre